"commence before first target. Stop." error

Question

In *.mak file I receive commands "commence before first target. Stop." I didn't change it before.

How to solve this problem?

Oviparous

How about posting the file contents? – Inrush

What's a *.mak-file? Not even wotsit.org/list.asp?al=M mentions it. What are you trying to do? What exactly is this about? If this is about make, then which incarnation of it are you using? There are plenty of makes. – Kreis

The question does not appear to have anything to do with c or c++, so I edited the tags. I could do with and indication of just what build system you are using, however. Try make --version or check with the make manpage. – Genniegennifer

Possible duplicate of {Makefile Error} "commands commence before first target. Stop." – Lithium

Answer 1

make (or NMAKE, or whatever flavour of make you are using) can be quite picky about the format of makefiles - check that you didn't actually edit the file in any way, e.g. changed line endings, spaces <-> tabs, etc.

Thirddegree

I got a build error due to a tab space after my line..this helped – Galaxy

a line before the error line, I had a tab space also – Sneer

In my case I had an equal sign (=) in the file name of the source code. Once I replaced it by a dash (-) the makefile worked just fine. – Fibroid

Answer 2

This means that there is a line which starts with a space, tab, or some other whitespace without having a target in front of it.

Commingle

Answer 3

if you have added a new line, Make sure you have added next line syntax in previous line. typically if "\" is missing in your previous line of changes, you will get this error.

Gilgai

In particular, you can't even have a line ending with whitespace after the backslash! – Historicism

Answer 4

This could be echoing outside the target, for instance

# Variable 
BAR = 
ifeq ($(FOO), 1)
    @echo "FooBar"  <----- generate the error
    BAR += foobar
endif
 
# Targets
all: 
...
...

Tearing

Answer 5

Also, make sure you dont have a space after \ in previous line Else this is the error

Natator

This is the sneaky one that got me, since the error message points to the line that isn't actually the problem – Nonconcurrence

Answer 6

It's a simple Mistake while adding a new file you just have to make sure that \ is added to the file before and the new file remain as it is eg.

Check Out what to do if i want to add a new file named customer.cc

Antisocial

Answer 7

This could also caused by mismatching brace/parenthesis.

$(TARGET}:
    do_something

Just use parenthesises and you'll be fine.

Leatherman